Incentives for Knowledge Production

One of the differences, often commented upon, between economists and computer scientists is the publication culture. Economists publish far fewer and longer papers for journals. Computer scientists publish many, smaller papers for conference proceedings. The journals (the top ones anyway) are heavily refereed while, the top conference proceedings are less so. Economics papers have long introductions that justify the importance of what is to come as well as (usually) carefully laying out the differences between the current paper and what has come before. It is not unusual for some readers to cry: don’t bore us get to the chorus. Computer science papers have short introductions with modest attempts at justifying what is to come. It is not unusual to hear that an economics paper is well written. Rarely, have I heard that of a computer science paper. Economists sometimes sneer at the lack of heft in CS papers, while Computer Scientists refer caustically to the bloat of ECON papers. CS papers are sometimes just wrong, etc. etc.

If one accepts these differences as more than caricature, but true, do they matter? We have two different ways for organizing the incentives for knowledge production. One rewards large contributions written up for journals with exacting (some would say idiosyncratic) standards and tastes. The other rewards the accumulation of many smaller contributions that appear in competitive proceedings that are, perhaps, more `democratic’ in their tastes. Is there any reason to suppose that one produces fewer important advances than the other? In the CS model, for example, ideas, even small ones, are disseminated quickly, publicly and evaluated by the community. Good ideas, even ones that appear in papers with mistakes, are identified and developed rapidly by the `collective’. An example is Broder’s paper on approximating the permanent. On the ECON side, much of this effort is borne by a smaller set of individuals and some of it in private in the sense of folk results and intuitions. Is there a model out there that would shed light on this?

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9 comments

I guess that the two are related but I would worry as much (or more) about dissemination of knowledge. A big issue for me is knowing what to read … papers that place things in a literature and fewer papers might be helpful for this (maybe we can go even further in this direction – limits on how much people can publish? ask everyone to rank their papers? etc)

Yes, I value the long intros when getting into a new area. It takes only a paper or two get an idea of what the issues scholars on that subject think are important and why. On self ranking, at various times Lones Smith (Wisconsin) and Dean Foster (Penn) did rank their work. Dean, I recall, measured the significance of a paper by the number of years it took for the results to be reproduced independently by another.

In an age of ever shorter and more frequent communication (e.g. twitter) it seems irrelevant to construct lengthy and well-guarded texts rather than shorter engagements that leave room for error and are open to wider peer review. Apart from the fact that such long texts are inaccessible to all but the very commited, they become obscelete quickly and remain irrelevant to the outside world. Better to have a speedy exchange of various inputs that can provide as you say a more “democratic” approach to knowledge creation.

Isn’t rather obvious: which of the two fields is making relentless progress, providing new tools that affect our everyday lives, opening up new fields of research, and which is sinking into a morass of academic infighting and sterility ?

Not to me. One could point to research programs in many areas that subsequently show themselves to be sterile. As, `nothing straight ever came from the crooked timber of humanity’, no field is immune to infighting. However, when I’m in my cups……………

I think a more significant issue is free access. I In CS almost everything is freely available on the web, whereas in Econ it is still not unusual for journal articles to be behind a paywall with no free version available. That fundamentally changes the dynamics: CS is more egalitarian because you don’t have to be in a big institution to access the literature, whereas in Econ you pretty much do. CS has always had significant contributors in industry too – think HP research, MS research or (in the old days) Bell labs – while in Econ not just being in a university but being in one of the few ‘right’ universities matters.

as a molecular biologist, I have been really struck by how long econ papers are, and much time is spent on the prior lit, and how there is an abstract, then a repeat in the intro, then a summary of the parts of the paper..redundantly redundant

I am also struck by how bad, at the base technical level, the graphs are in econ papers; its like these math geniuses can’t figure out how to modify the defaults in excel, which supersuck

“When a scholar publishes a paper, it is a letter sent to unknown recipients. If the job has been well done, then with luck it may be found and read, perhaps years later, by people who may take it into their lives and let it change their understanding of the world.”

I guess in the age of Facebook and Twitter, people prefer shorter messages (status updates) to letters. On a serious note, both forms of production are healthy and will continue to exist.